Review: Rumsfeld himself is the ultimate ‘Unknown Known’

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This Monday, March 24, 2014 photo shows director Errol Morris posing for a photo in Los Angeles. Morris directed the recently released film “The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld.” Morris spent more than 30 hours interviewing Donald Rumsfeld. He sifted through thousands of memos _ snowflakes, Rumsfeld called them _ from the former Secretary of Defense and architect of the Iraq War. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

“The Unknown Known,” Errol Morris’ engaging but ultimately infuriating portrait of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, takes its title from one of Rumsfeld’s gnomic, angels-on-a-pin disquisitions that helped make his news conferences during the Iraq War must-see TV for Washingtonians and policy wonks everywhere.

That signature Rumsfeldian pugnacity — and improbable charisma — are still much in evidence in this alternately enlightening and confounding documentary, which in its structure and subject matter invites immediate comparisons to Morris’ brilliant 2003 film “The Fog of War,” about Robert McNamara. But as “The Unknown Known” makes clear, Rumsfeld is no McNamara: Seemingly unable to engage in self-reflection, let alone self-criticism, Rumsfeld is given virtually full rein to control the narrative by Morris, who seems either uninterested or unwilling to probe further than his subject’s own version of himself and his life.

That’s not to say that “The Unknown Known” doesn’t possess value, especially as the political history of an era that spans the Nixon administration and the Bush Doctrine. The film traces Rumsfeld’s beginnings as a Navy veteran and congressman in the 1960s, a career during which he became a superbly skilled Washington navigator: a canny, smoothly effective careerist whose love of words (he’s an OED fan) would become crucial to advancing his agenda. At the Pentagon, he treated colleagues to a blizzard of white-paper memos that he called “snowflakes,” in which he asked questions both sharply literal and fuzzily rhetorical, often conducting high-flown inquiries into the meaning of such terms as “guerrilla warfare” and usually ending with a perfectly passive-aggressive “Thanks.”

Through skillful editing and a stirring score by Danny Elfman, “The Unknown Known” invests Rumsfeld’s otherwise banal Washington trajectory with unlikely tension and suspense. What’s more, his maddening habit of pseudo-philosophical speculation fit neatly into Morris’ own ruminative, erudite rhetoric. But if viewers come to “The Unknown Known” hoping for catharsis — or even just a few answers — about Rumsfeld’s role in planning and executing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, they may find themselves leaving more frustrated than rewarded. Faced with the enormity of losses in Iraq and whether or not the decision to invade was the right one, Rumsfeld has only this to say: “Time will tell.”

Morris pushes back on his subject once or twice: At one point, Rumsfeld flatly declares that the United States doesn’t assassinate people, to which Morris quickly replies by reminding him of Dora Farms, when the military tried to kill Saddam Hussein with four “bunker buster” bombs. But all too often, Morris is inclined to let Rumsfeld have his say unchallenged, without even a follow-up question. Tracing his subject’s tenure as a Middle East envoy in the 1980s, Morris shows the now-famous picture of Rumsfeld smiling and shaking the hand of then-enemy-of-our-enemy Hussein — and there it hangs for posterity, unremarked or commented upon.

One of “The Unknown Known’s” visual conceits is a vast blue ocean which, coupled with huge stacks of papers and card catalogs, suggests the vast written record that Rumsfeld has created, perhaps in part to obscure some vital, hidden — and damning — truth. It’s an elegant metaphor, but rather than ferret it out, “The Unknown Known” leaves viewers feeing just as at sea as when the film started. Speaking of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a “failure of imagination,” Rumsfeld compares the episode to the bombing at Pearl Harbor, noting that the U.S. military at the time was “chasing the wrong rabbit.” Morris is clearly chasing the right one; in this case, though, the rabbit was clever enough to get away.

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.